


Charity

by skyholdherbalist



Series: As the moth sees light [2]
Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age II, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Angst, Casual Sex, F/M, Kirkwall (Dragon Age)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-09
Updated: 2018-08-09
Packaged: 2019-06-24 03:43:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 411
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15621801
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skyholdherbalist/pseuds/skyholdherbalist
Summary: How Cullen saw love, after Kirkwall.





	Charity

There was a time, briefly, when he got the notion that love might solve his problems.  So he looked for love.  It was a short-lived idea.

Things had calmed in Kirkwall, relatively speaking.  He found himself with a few moments to look around, to breathe, to realize he was still alive.  

He tried out the idea of love in his mind.  Someone might catch his eye in a particular way, their voice would be interesting, or they may say something funny and he would… imagine them, together.  Like trying on hats.  

But nothing fit.  This one too small, that one made him look funny.  Perhaps he was not a hat person.

If he gave an inkling of these thoughts to any of them, no one ever reciprocated.  The only person who showed interest, without any encouragement, was Michaela.  Lady Wallace, as it were.

She had been assigned to coordinate with the Gallows as part of a ladies’ guild helping with relief efforts.  Cullen had resisted the questionable assistance of these women, but their money was useful.  He summed her up quickly—a self-involved noble playing at charity—but she did what he asked of her: deliveries, checking on locations, even in the alienages, to see what was needed.  She did work hard enough.  After a time, he respected her.  

When she begged off one of their weekly meetings, asking him to meet at her home for dinner instead, he had some notion she wanted to play at a bit more than charity.  He wasn’t a fool.  

And yet he went along with it.  A lonely, spoiled wife; a traveling merchant husband who hadn’t been home in years; and he, if he could see himself objectively, still young, not ugly, in a position of power he’d never asked for, power he could use to make her feel like more than a fussy Orlesian lapdog.  Like a person, who could do things for other people.  She repaid him the only way she seemed to know how.

It wasn’t unpleasant, he reasoned at the time.  But when it became something real, more than a half-hearted fantasy, he wasn’t quite in his own body.  Like watching from the outside.  He didn’t feel like a person.  Hadn’t since Kinloch.  Perhaps he never would.

But his body responded, and his mind was distracted.   A few times they met this way.  Then Lord Wallace returned, and Lady Wallace quit her charity work, both for Kirkwall, and for him.


End file.
